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Summary:

Although Walton built up a small chain of Ben Franklin variety store franchises from 1945, it was not until 1962 that he opened his first Wal-Mart discount store.

Walton and his brother, Bud, opened the first Wal-Mart Discount City in 1962.

In one video, David Glass, who succeeded Sam Walton as chief executive of Wal-Mart in 1988, recalled his impressions after attending the opening of the second Wal-Mart Discount City at Harrison in 1964.

Sam Walton did not invent discount retailing.

The Financial Times London Page 18 'WAL-MART: A HISTORY OF SAM WALTON'S RETAIL PHENOMENON' by Sandra S. Vance and Roy V. Scott Twayne Publishers, New York, Dollars 14.95 240 pages Many people might be said to be the personification of the American Dream; few are better qualified for that title than Sam Walton.

``I thought to myself this is absolutely the worst discount store, or retail store, I have ever seen,'' said Glass, who was president of a drugstore chain at the time.

He's ranked as the richest man in the nation by a leading business magazine, but to folks in Bentonville, a town of about 8,700 people, Sam Walton is just another neighbor.

``Sam Walton is more interested in his backhand than he is in his bank account,'' says Don Shinkle, Wal-Mart spokesman.

The seeds of the Wal-Mart empire were sown when Sam and his brother James L., or Bud, opened the first Wal-Mart Discount City in 1962.

``He spends most of his time talking to associates and customers,'' Shinkle said, ``and he always comes back with many ideas from them''.

His company, Wal-Mart, made sales of Dollars 55bn last year, and after Walton's death Fortune magazine reported that his wife and four children held between them the second-largest fortune in the world - Dollars 23.5bn.

Aside from the other displays and presentations, the center also has a replica of Sam Walton's original office at the store, including many fixtures he used 40 years ago.

In one of many contributions from friends and family, Don Soderquist, Wal-Mart's chief operating officer, tells of finding Sam one Saturday morning on his hand and knees at the local Kmart store, analysing his rival's stock.

``He feels any attention to Sam Walton is to the individual and he prefers attention to Sam Walton (the founder of) the company,'' Shinkle said.

Sam Walton convinced Bob Bogle, then a public health officer, to take over management of his Bentonville Ben Franklin store in 1955.

The church-going son of a farmer born in 1918 near Kingfisher, Oklahoma, he founded a store chain which made him America's richest man, and which, shortly before his death in 1992, became the world's biggest retailer.

Three years ago, Forbes also began listing the world's wealthiest people.

Walton ``said he wanted to put in about a dozen stores'' and needed someone to tend the shop in Bentonville while he and his brother built a chain of Ben Franklins, Bogle said in a recent interview.

the term for employees first coined in 1972 to stress that all Wal-Mart employees are partners in the company _ and to Sam Walton's leadership and knack for hiring the ``right person at the right time''.

Manager Don Bost remembers one day last summer when a secretary telephoned from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. Chairman Sam Walton was about to land at a nearby airport and the secretary asked if someone could fetch him and bring him to the De Soto store.

Wal-Mart calls its sales help associates instead of employees.

Forty years after Sam Walton first hung out his shingle, Walton's 5&10 will reopen to show how a little rural storekeeper built a discount retail empire.

The Financial Times London Page 26 MADE IN AMERICA: MY STORY By Sam Walton Doubleday, Dollars 22.50. 269 pages Being an American folk hero is a tricky assignment, as Ross Perot found out.

At the time of its incorporation in 1971, Wal-Mart had only 38 outlets with sales of Dollars 44m - not enough to earn a place in trade journal Discount Merchandiser's list of the 71 biggest US discount retailers.

And Wal-Mart Vice Chairman Donald Soderquist recalls that when Walton took his idea of putting discount stores in rural areas to Ben Franklin headquarters in Chicago, officials there ``just really didn't see a future in it''.

Walton is a character it would be difficult to invent, an all-American boy who became one of the world's most successful businessmen.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Visitors Center opens Wednesday in the same building on the downtown square where Walton first opened for business on May 9, 1950.

The first store, at Rogers, opened two years earlier.

``He is unavailable,'' said Wal-Mart spokesman Don Shinkle of the silver-haired founder of the nation's third-largest retail chain, based in Bentonville, about 150 miles northwest of Little Rock.

Everyone, from Wal-Mart President and Chief Operating Officer David Glass down to an hourly store worker, can readily quote the gospel according to Sam, as he is called.

Walton made that listing as the richest American every year since.

Walton learned from them all, but was unique in taking his discount stores into small towns of a few thousand people, where shoppers used to travelling long distances were delighted to have a cut-price store nearby selling everything they needed.

The 71-year-old Walton, considered to be one of the world's richest people, grabbed a note pad Tuesday evening and started hand-writing merchandise prices for customers so their bills could be tallied on calculators quickly.

Shinkle said Walton stays busy visiting many of the more than 1,400 stores operated by the company he started as a single five-and-dime at Rogers more than two decades ago.

The son of an Oklahoma real-estate broker, he opened the first general store in what was to become the Wal-Mart chain in Bentonville, in the backwaters of Arkansas, in 1950, writes Martin Dickson.

Sam Walton, founder of the Wal-Mart chain of discount supermarkets who died of cancer in April, negotiated these pitfalls much better than most.

Mr Walton also disproved the conventional wisdom that large discount stores could not operate successfully in the small, rural towns of the US south.

Walton was first listed by Forbes as the nation's richest man in October 1985.

Ten years later, with 330 stores and Dollars 1.6bn sales, it was only the 33rd-biggest retailer in the US.

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